


all your anger bore

by ssstrychnine



Category: The Pacific (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, First Kiss, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, louisiana myth, snafu the rougarou
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-27
Updated: 2016-01-27
Packaged: 2018-05-16 15:17:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,386
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5830489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ssstrychnine/pseuds/ssstrychnine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Perhaps he was a wolf all along and what is hidden in his smile in peacetime is drawn across the sky when he’s at war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	all your anger bore

When Merriell Shelton is seven his mother tells him he’s the devil. It’s something he grasps only barely; it’s when candles in church are blown out without wind, it’s playing cat’s cradle under the pews with other children, deft hands, one thousand string figures needed to confuse Lucifer. But when his mother tells him it’s him, her eyes fever-bright and terrible, he is confused.

“You got it in you, same as your daddy,” she says, in a voice so flat he flinches. “He’s gone and left his worst parts wit me.” 

Merriell reaches for her hands, fluttering at her hair and her mouth and her sides, the bones in her knuckles cracking. He calls them her kindling fingers, they make flame from nothing, and he reaches for them then. She slaps his hands away and leaves the room and he pulls string from his pockets and starts a cradle to keep her safe. 

It becomes easier to understand as he gets older. He has been told stories about rougarou since he was barely walking. Bedtime stories about blood and wolves and sickness told to keep kids from cracking wise; fear-induced obedience. It’s not his mother who tells him he’s that Louisiana myth, he finds it out for himself, catching his reflection in puddles and glass; something sharp as he is must be wicked too. His mother hardly speaks to him and he dreams of blood and his fingernails are dark with dirt when he wakes up. His mother hardly speaks to him but the moon _sings_ and he takes what he can get. He tells her that he has a new family in the sky, hoping to spare her the responsibility of having a wolf for a son, and when she starts to cry he is confused all over again.

He reads everything about the rougarou that he can find, like maybe there is a way to fix it written out in steps. He reads that you can kill one with fire and he holds a match to his hand until he drops it but he doesn’t feel any different afterwards. Still angry, still wrong. He reads that if you cut its head off it will die but the axe around the back of the house is dubiously sharp and he has no one to swing it for him. Most often he reads that hurting someone else will put the curse on them instead but he doesn’t think it’s possible to hate someone so much. He wakes up outside sometimes, with scratches on his arms and dirt in his hair and his mouth full of blood he cannot be sure is his.

At fourteen he leaves school for good and he throws away his cradle strings and starts guiding tourists through the winding streets of New Orleans for coins and cigarettes. If they’re rude or proud or ugly he steals from them but mostly he just does as he is asked. His mother hardly speaks to anyone at all anymore, except to the girls she sews dresses for. When she sees him her face gets pale and tired and it hurts Merriell to look at so he spends most of his time away from the house. He lies in grass in the evenings and plays at being a younger boy than he is. He holds his silver coins up to the night sky to make a twin for the moon. He digs holes between tree roots for treasure he finds in the swamp, in the cracks between concrete. Bright stones and animal bones and once, a dirty nugget of gold.

“It’s tree gum,” his mother tells him when he tries to give it to her. “Ain’t worth a damn.” 

He buries it anyway, reasoning that if it’s powerful enough to make his mother speak it’s powerful enough for something else. For whatever part of him that thinks of his buried treasure as spells; sacrifices to the trees to give her back to him or take away part of him she hates. 

On full moon nights he cuts crosses into his palms and smears the blood onto the dirt and asks the witches, or the wolves, or the moon herself to break the curse on him but his mother still looks at him like he’s taken something from her and he still dreams of blood and wakes up with scratches and a bitten tongue. He remembers the stories that say he has to draw someone else’s blood and he avoids touching anyone at all if he can help it. He tears at his nail beds so that no one will want to hold his hand. He bites his lips to bleeding so that no one will want to kiss him. He cultivates loneliness until his teeth ache with it.

Merriell is eighteen when war breaks out and he does not often think about rougarou. It needles him sometimes, if someone touches him without warning, if he sees his mother in the street, but they are both different people now and he is mostly sure that werewolves don’t exist. His dreams of blood have stopped and the moon is silent and he almost never hurts himself in his sleep anymore. He can see now that a sad woman and her lost child can turn into monsters with the right turn of phrase. But it’s still something he considers when he considers the marines. He might draw blood for his country and shake off a curse with a single bullet, rougarou or not.

In boot camp someone calls him Snafu and he doesn't remember the marine who says it first but the name sticks like mud after rain. It's something to do with the way he moves or his eyes or his crooked fingers. It’s something to do with how cagey he is with stories of his own life, how easily stories about running with wolves and being born from the moon fall off his tongue instead. It’s a better name than his mother gave him in any case and he is glad to be rid of the last piece of her that clings to him, even if it only lasts as long as the war does. He does not expect to go home.

He picks mortars because they look something like how he feels inside. The way the earth is blown wide, the white smoke afterwards, the whole world shattered and cratered. He holds the small bombs slipshod between his palms, cross legged on the floor, he learns how they feel, the careful weight of them, and he grins up at the other recruits who look down at him with sick, uneasy expressions.

Snafu is nineteen when he meets Eugene Sledge. He’s only been a year at war but it feels longer than the whole of his life before it. If there ever was a curse he’s shaken it off a thousand times over now, he _must_ have, his hands will be stained red forever and someone else a rougarou, screaming into war. But he still feels loose in his skin and he still feels the moon above him, pulling at some thread, and this Alabama boy with bright eyes makes him feel it even worse.

“Where’re you from?” Sledge asks, on one of those too short days before they ship out. One of those too short days where Snafu is still figuring out which of these new kids he can trust, because he’ll be forced to soon enough.

“Nowhere,” he mutters, using his ka-bar to curl a half-moon of dirt out from under his thumbnail. 

“Louisiana?” 

“I’m from the moon,” he says, sighing the words out, drawing out every letter until the meaning warps. There is this long silence where Sledge is figuring out if he’s supposed to get mad or laugh. Most of them just leave, rolling their eyes, unsettled by the strangeness Snafu wears like armour. He cleans his fingernails and waits for it, but Sledge doesn’t leave. He leans back on his palms and he is nodding a little and smiling a little.

“Oh yeah, I been there,” he says, tilting his head back in the sun. “Full of assholes.”

Snafu taps the blade of his knife against his knuckles, rapping out a muffled, split-skin sound. He jams it back into its scabbard and lights a cigarette and doesn’t say anything more. But neither of them move from their place in the dirt and it feels strangely intimate already, sitting silent on the edge of war. Snafu considers ways to make Sledge hate him and then flicks ash onto his forearm, casual enough that it might be an accident, accurate enough that it could only be on purpose. Sledge rolls his eyes and leaves and Snafu lies back in the dirt and grins at the sky.

The fighting never changes him the way he thinks it should, the way people will write about in memoirs, a messy smudge of death and _death_ and hate. Snafu has been angry for as long as he can remember, this is just a different canvas for it. In New Orleans he’d buried it in pretty girls, their finger curls, and pretty boys too, the ones who pushed him to his knees. In Peleliu he splashes it out in garish colour, gold cut from mouths, blood staining his shirt cuff, and he changes his mind about curses again. Perhaps he was a wolf all along and what is hidden in his smile in peacetime is drawn across the sky when he’s at war. 

The way Sledge looks at him makes him shiver, hot and cold. He doesn’t know why he tells him not to take trophies. It seems suddenly awful that he would do that and that it might be by his example. Perhaps that’s the way the curse works, he thinks, perhaps it’s always been his fate to turn someone like Sledge to trophy cutting viciousness. Eugene Sledge with bright eyes and a pencil stub. Snafu does not like losing sight of him or being out of reach of him or being unable to hear his voice. He takes higher ground so he can see more of the things that threaten their lives. He takes every first watch and every second gulp of water.

On the night that Hamm dies, Snafu unravels. It feels like he and Sledge have switched places, his hands on Kathy’s back, numb-lipped comfort. His hands on Sledge too and him vibrating with anger and hopelessness. Snafu can’t sort out his thoughts, they’re a mess of right and wrong and awful. He folds the tattered poncho, _his_ tattered poncho, and he folds it again and again until his hands feel chapped and then he trudges back down the hill after Sledge. He has not thought of wolves and curses in a long time. Every one of them on these shell-shocked islands has met the devil already.

It gets worse, of course, just when he starts to think it can’t. He can’t meet Sledge’s eyes anymore, he doesn’t want him to see something there he can’t forgive. At best he thinks he’ll just look empty, moon-eyes and a hollow skull. It gets worse and then just as quickly it stops and they’re thrown into bright daylight and dry clothing and twitchy trigger-fingers. Snafu doesn’t trust it and he keeps Sledge as close as if they were still in a foxhole. He feels like he ought to sleep curled up at the foot of his bed, a new dog, wolf, boy. His bones feel ancient and Sledge is not bright-eyed anymore but he is still beautiful. 

Burgie leaves them perched on rocks, passing liquid gold between them. Sledge has his pipe and Snafu laughs at that and lights a cigarette. Sledge keeps flinching at the yelling coming from the others, the flares, drunken revelry not dying screams but they sound close to the same thing. 

“You think the rest of everything still exists?” Sledge asks, looking out across the black water.

“I’m sure all the shit does,” Snafu mutters, sipping from the bottle, letting the liquor sit warm and close on his tongue. Sledge looks back to him, makes a face, reaches for the bottle. Snafu gives it to him and their fingers collide and he almost drops it and Sledge laughs. 

“You’ll fit right in then,” he says easily and Snafu hums his agreement.

They stay there while the party dies behind them, not talking much, comfortable and easy in a way Snafu can’t remember ever being with anyone. He wants to tell Sledge everything that has ever happened to him; the time he stole a ring right off a woman’s finger, the time he broke his collarbone falling from a tree, the last time he spoke to his mother. He keeps his silence with the bottle and with cigarettes and he presses his fingers along the seams of his clothing. 

“I’m gonna miss you, Snafu,” says Sledge, his voice open wide, like it’s just so _easy_ for him to say. Snafu grinds his cigarette out on the rock.

“Nah, you’re not,” he says and _his_ voice sounds scattershot and terrified. He gets to his feet and climbs down from their place among the rocks and he can feel Sledge’s eyes on him as he walks away. 

Snafu is twenty four when they’re sent back home. It’s a hard thing to do; it feels too sharp, too deadly, like the rug will be pulled out and they’ll fall back into their holes in the mud. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands so he starts buying roll-your-own, to fill out the space his gun has left with tobacco and papers. Very quietly he thinks it wouldn’t be so bad to share a foxhole with Sledge forever. He thinks he’d know what to do there. He thinks he’d like the closeness of it.

They’re on the train and it’s easy for Snafu to think it’ll go on forever. So much endless space outside, he’d forgotten a place could ever be so empty. Sledge sits across from him and Snafu wants to lean over and take his face in his hands. To steady him, burn him into his brain so he won’t forget any part of him. He presses his palm down flat on the table instead and traces around the edges of his fingers like he’s a kid making a thanksgiving turkey on paper.

“Merriell,” says Sledge, testing out the name, and Snafu flinches and scowls.

“Eugene,” he mutters, like a retort. _Gene_ , he thinks and he tugs at his collar.

But Sledge is looking at him strangely and when Snafu meets his eyes it’s like a blow. He’s forgotten about Burgie, asleep next to him, about the rest of the train, about girls in lipstick and endless fields and bloody warfare. Sledge is looking at him with his lips parted and his eyes grave and his hands are on the table, fingers braided together, carefully casual. Snafu thinks it would be so easy, to fit his fingertips into the dips in Sledge’s knuckles, to turn his hands over, to trace the lines of his palm. Then Burgie mumbles something in his sleep and Snafu jerks to his feet and stumbles passed him and away.

He locks himself in the tiny carriage bathroom, scowls into the grimy mirror, tugs on his fingers until the joints crack. This is not how it’s supposed to go. They’re supposed to shake hands, pat one another on the shoulder, salute in their pressed uniforms and crooked ties. Never speak again. Snafu has no one to go back to and no one to leave behind. Easiest to cut these years out of a calendar. Go back to wolves and moonlight, he'll dream of blood forever. He washes his hands and then he washes them again and he fumbles in his pocket for his pouch of tobacco and there is a knock on the door.

“Piss off,” he snarls and he drops the pouch and picks it up and shoves it back in his pocket and the knocking sounds again. He opens it and Sledge is there, pushing his way inside, closing the door behind them. It isn’t a surprise, not really, but Snafu nearly bites through his tongue anyway.

“The fuck do you want?” he asks, pressing himself against the wall, as far away as he can get in the tiny compartment. 

“You okay?” Sledge asks, moving closer, looking skipped-beat concerned. Snafu doesn’t reply. He stares at Sledge’s right ear, his jaw, his neck, anywhere to avoid meeting his eyes. 

“Always,” he says, tilting his chin, licking his lips. 

Sledge touches him, the flat of his palm soft on Snafu’s jaw, the stretch of skin under his ear, and Snafu shuts his eyes. He is pressed so hard against the tiny sink it’s painful, but he can’t seem to move. A thousand bullets in the air and he is taken down by a touch. He opens his eyes and Sledge is closer still and in his helplessness he pushes back. Takes a handful of Sledge’s collar and shakes his hands off and pushes back. Sledge grins, this bared-teeth smile that makes Snafu’s heart stutter. Sledge kisses him, hard, a clash of lips and teeth and tongue. Snafu wants to breath him in, feels the fabric of his shirt rip a little in his hands, tugs harder on it when Sledge pulls away. Impossible not to have him in his hands. Impossible not to keep kissing him.

“ _Gene_ ,” he says and Sledge kisses him again, on the corner of his mouth, the ridge of his cheekbone. Snafu tries to meet his lips but Sledge is smiling, turns his head, and Snafu's mouth collides clumsily with his ear. 

“Burgie’s awake,” Sledge says and Snafu goes still, lets him go. Pushes his shaking hands into his pockets.

Sledge leaves first and Snafu adjusts his clothing and presses his wet hands against the back of his neck, his flushed cheeks. He looks feverish. His mouth looks swollen and he worries his lower lip with his teeth like he might be able to taste Sledge still. Unbidden he thinks of the rougarou; perhaps this is how the curse works, a combination of blood and want. Maybe all you have to do to rid yourself of it is to kiss someone you... well. He pulls out his tobacco pouch and carefully rolls a cigarette, foregoing the filter, and he lights it as he’s walking back to the table. 

Burgie leaves and Snafu watches the way he falls into his family again. He wonders if his mother is still alive. He hopes she isn’t. He and Sledge trade glances and Snafu tries not to think of kissing him, tries not to think of the number of minutes they’ll be here together. Sledge will have a white house waiting for him. Sledge will have a lily girl to marry. 

When Sledge falls asleep Snafu is relieved. It is almost dark and they’re just outside New Orleans and Snafu hasn’t got much experience with goodbyes. When he’s sure Sledge is dreaming; they have slept next to one another for so long that he knows the tells, his breath soft and deep, his eyes moving under their lids, Snafu starts to speak.

“When I was a kid,” he starts, leaning across the table, resting his chin on his knuckles, whispering the words, almost soundless. “My ma told me I was the devil.” He smiles then, something bitter and sharp, something that tears at his lips. He almost laughs. He drags a finger around the rim of his glass from dinner. He rests his cheek on the cool laminate of the table. 

“I think she’s right though. I thought I was a rougarou, I thought I had bad blood but now I think it’s somethin’ else. A bad heart maybe. A bad head. Some kinda sickness you ought to have nothing to do with, Eugene Sledge.” He licks his lips to taste the name and the train is slowing now. “Anyway it don’t matter I’m... I’m gone and you’re...” 

He shuts his eyes for a moment, presses his knuckles to the sockets until stars dance in the dark. And then he gets to his feet, grabs his duffel, and leaves.

**Author's Note:**

> so yeah i can't get enough of these kids?? i've been watching episode 9 over and over. it's really quite.. it's so much!! im @oneangryshot on tumblr and id really like to yell about these kids to someone (anyone) (whatever)! thank you for reading!


End file.
